The choice on Tuesday

It’s actually pretty simple in my eyes: jobs not mobs. This is a great illustration in about 1 minute and 24 seconds.

There’s really no better way to illustrate the choice. And look: I may have been part of the Republican party apparatus around here for a decade, but people should know by now that I don’t always subscribe to the theory of “my party, wrong or right.” When they made what was, in my opinion, a choice for Presidential nominee two years ago who was both insufficiently conservative and of questionable character and morality, I decided I couldn’t continue in good conscience.

But don’t forget I wrote this, too:

I guess the way I look at it there are three possibilities here: either Trump is going to lose to Hillary, he will beat Hillary and govern exactly as I predict he will, or he will be a great President and I will have assessed him incorrectly. Truly I wouldn’t mind being wrong for the sake of this great nation, but I have no evidence to believe I will be.

Indeed President Trump has, in several respects, dragged the GOP kicking and screaming into doing some great things such as taking a meat axe to the regulatory state, beginning the process of cutting taxes, and renegotiating the progressively more awful NAFTA trade agreement into something that will hopefully be more America-friendly. Of course, to do this we have had to endure a significant coarseness of dialogue and continuing circus sideshow on Twitter – although the latter is also egged on by a mainstream media that will not give him the same sort of fawning coverage his predecessor (who, by the way, has abandoned the traditional role of an ex-president of gracefully leaving the stage and allowing his successor to govern as he sees fit) received in his eight years.

So now I have some evidence that Donald Trump is at least trying to lead us in the right direction. In many respects he’s like Larry Hogan here in Maryland: neither of them are doctrinaire conservatives, but in the time and place in which they were placed in power they could be just what is needed to make a transition to even better leadership.

And both these men have had a significant obstacle put in their path over their first term: in Trump’s case, not only was the media against him, but so were those Americans who believed that the majority should have ruled – even though it was a plurality in fact and the rules of the game were long-established in that we have a national election that is scored as 50 separate state elections. (In Maine and Nebraska, it’s cut down even further into elections for each Congressional district since each represents one electoral vote. Maryland should adopt the same model.) Because of that, Congressional Republicans were cowed into not being as conservative as they had led their voters to believe they would be – and to prove they had spines of rubber, a large number of them bailed rather than risk losing an election in what was hyped for many months as a “blue wave” for 2018. This unusually high number of retirements has left the GOP majority vulnerable.

In Larry Hogan’s case, the problem was much more simple: the same voters that put him in place as a counter to the previous leadership left too many in office who represented the other Maryland problem: gaining seven Delegates and two Senators was nice, but still left Hogan short of the number needed to really Change Maryland. Moreover, some of those departing Democrats were the ones more likely to support Hogan (in fact, one endorsed him) while those that came in seemed to harden their resistance. They weren’t your father’s Democratic Party, the ones who believed government should provide a hand up – but not be the dictator of all in your life, for to be such would prove them to be Soviet-style communists. (That strain of Democrat lives on in some places, like the Eastern Shore, but not in Annapolis or Washington, D.C.)

So let’s say the conventional wisdom pundits are correct in the case of Congress, and it swings back to a Democrat majority – even if it’s only 218 to 217. (In that case, it’s possible we may not know until December when Georgia and Louisiana complete any necessary runoff elections.) What will be accomplished in the runup to the 2020 Presidential election? Not much, unless you consider continual investigation and grandstanding to promote the eventual Democrat candidate opposing President Trump to be worthy goals. We will continue to live by continuing resolution and omnibus spending pacts that grow government and kick all those cans we should be gathering for recycling down the road instead of solving problems. It won’t make the mobs go away and it won’t satisfy those who are looking for revenge for Hillary’s loss, but it will anger Trump supporters – and that’s a group one could describe as the backbone of America:

On the other hand, even if the Republicans prevail in the House by 218-217 or better, it will keep a lid on unnecessary grandstanding and investigation. Perhaps some of the other needed reforms in immigration, entitlement programs, and regulation will take place – items which have zero chance of succeeding in a Pelosi-controlled House. It also will help to convince those in the middle that the Antifa mobs are representing a fringe element since they could not effect elective change when they had the opportunity, and that their radical ideas such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or scrapping the Electoral College are not issues with which one can win election in most of America outside ivory towers and the Beltway.

The same holds true in Maryland. There’s a reason the Maryland GOP is doing a “drive for five” new State Senators: the prospect of a Hogan veto being upheld would be enough to dissuade the radical Left in Maryland from introducing more of the extreme proposals that they did in his first term, such as the overbearing paid sick leave bill, school “reform” that eliminates the stick of introducing competition to improve school quality, and many other measures Hogan either vetoed and saw overturned or threw up his hands and allowed to become law without his signature. To have that protection in his pocket means Maryland Democrats would have to hew more closely to the “middle temperament” for which Maryland is supposedly famous.

So there is a choice to make tomorrow and I encourage you to prayerfully consider yours. In the meantime, tomorrow I will have the little odds and ends that have made up the runup to Election 2018, and then on Wednesday or Thursday I will probably look back on what transpired and take my guess as to why.